Iris D. Tommelein is Professor of Engineering and Project Management, in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. She teaches and conducts research to develop and advance the theory and principles of project-based production management, applied to–but not limited to–the Architecture-Engineering-Construction (AEC) industry, what is termed ‘Lean Construction.’
Professor Tommelein is an expert on construction site layout and logistics, as well as materials- and supply-chain management. Her work experience is in commercial building- and industrial construction. Her research focuses on enabling integrated owner-designer-builder teams to continuously improve their process- and product development performance. Current research topics include adaptive project leadership, design- and change management, and ‘green’ life-cycle engineering. Much of her work builds on using IT to support product and process design, planning, scheduling, simulation, and visualization (such as the development and use of Building Information Models (BIM)).
Professor Tommelein directs the Project Production Systems Laboratory (P2SL – p2sl.berkeley.edu) at UC Berkeley. P2SL is a research laboratory dedicated to developing and deploying knowledge and tools for project management, as well as a learning lab for the Northern California construction industry. She is an active participant in the International Group for Lean Construction (IGLC – www.iglc.net) and a Research Affiliate of the Lean Construction Institute (LCI – www.leanconstruction.org). She served on the Executive Committee of ASCE’s Technical Council on Computing and Information Technology (TCCIT) and is a member of the Construction Research Council of the Construction Institute of ASCE. She is the 2002 recipient of the Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Prize awarded by ASCE “for her research on civil engineering computing for managing project-based production systems in the engineering-architecture-construction industry”.
Professor Tommelein’s education includes a 5-year Civil Engineer-Architect degree from the VUB (Belgium), an MS (Construction Engineering & Management), an MS (Computer Science), as well as a PhD (Civil Engineering) all from Stanford University (USA).